UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake, has emphasized that universal Children’s Day is more than a day to celebrate children everywhere, but an annual opportunity to recommit ourselves to protecting the rights of every child.
 
Lake said in a statement that the universal, inalienable rights that the world pledged to protect on this day in 1989, when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, is the “Rights to dignity and security. To be treated fairly and to live free from oppression. To have a fair chance in life.
 

Two years after Nigerian militant group Boko Haram attacked his hometown of Gwoza – killing men and burning down houses – Ali Bello feared the worst when he received a panicked message from his wife.

The rickshaw driver – who works in the nearby town of Mubi in northeast Nigeria – raced home to find that their five-year-old son had been rushed to hospital after falling severely ill.

“When they told me the boy had polio, I did not believe it,” Bello told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

Fresh evidence indicate up to 85,700 Nigerian children die each year from complications because they are born too soon.
 
Child health organistions, including MamaYe and the Association for Reproductive and Family Health (ARFH) which highlighted the figures to mark World Prematurity Day in Abuja, said the complications from being born before 37 weeks of pregnancy were “leading causes of death among newborn babies.”
 
“That many deaths of children-that’s a lot, that’s a lot of deaths,” said Dr. Oladipo Ladapo, president of ARFH.
 

The Kaduna State government and global corporate giant, General Electric have signed an agreement to equip 278 healthcare facilities across the state.
 
At a ceremony held to mark the commencement of the programme in the northern state, the President of GE Healthcare in charge of Africa, Farid Fezoua, said the essence was to create an innovative healthcare system that would reduce preventable child-maternal deaths in Kaduna State.